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In a previous article on syncing and restoring your GMail account with the excellent GMVault I voiced one minor and perhaps unfair criticism. Namely, that as backed up e-mails had no recognizable titles, it was virtually impossible to identify specific messages. But, of course, that was never the intended purpose of GMVault. It would have been the icing on the cake if it was.

I love Mozilla Thunderbird. I love using it with IMAP which lets me synchronize with GMail. To make the experience complete, I also like to view my RSS feeds. Setting them up is shamefully easy. There's no excuse not to try it, so let's do it.

First, we need to set up an account so select Other Accounts from the File > New drop-down menu to initiate the Account Wizard. There are three choices. Accept the default for Blogs and Newsfeeds.

Like any other aspect of life the internet is awash with hype. And snake oil salesmen. It's lure exceed the benefits those spam e-mails promise that inundate your inbox with offers of little blue pills to reach those parts of your anatomy other chemicals just can't reach. However, sometimes the hype is not just, well, hype.

Mozilla's Firefox browser has been downloaded more that one billion times and its success is reflected in the millions of downloads of one of its killer features: addons (or extensions, as we geriatrics called them). The Browser operates under a tri licence and the addons for it are overwhelmingly free and open too. They empower the user and extend the browser. They help to put the user in control. Ubiquity does this in a way that makes web mashups creative fun and allows you to command the web, not just surf it, without any need to be a programming master of the universe.

GNU/Linux has never been short of audio and video players, but they live in a world of multiple codecs, chief culprit amongst them being MP3, AAC, WMA and (Adobe) Flash. I say "culprits" because they are not free and open codecs. They are encumbered by patents; most websites with embedded audio/video use them and most of the people who view them are also using other patented software: Windows. GNU/Linux is a good alternative and all distros come bundled with free and open multimedia alternatives too: Ogg. You would not be surprised that these players can handle Ogg but what if I told you that Mozilla's Firefox browser could not only handle this codec but could be used also to transcode videos to that format? Interested? Read on.

By the time you read this Karmic Koala will have been released to a waiting world, but I couldn't wait. A felicitous combination of a desire to do a distribution upgrade to the release candidate and a Twitter arriving on my laptop giving me a link to Raindrop kept me busy for the day. I was intrigued by Raindrop and having used other Mozilla lab experimental software I was determined to see what all the hype was about. If you like the idea of combining a tool for aggregating Twitter, e-mail, RSS and other social Web 2.0 stuff with free and open standards then read on.

This post is in response to Dario Borghino's story, "Why Open Source is not Free Software". Go read that first...

I have a couple problems with this post. First of all, there is much less difference between free and open source software than this post suggest. Secondly, patents do not have much effect on the software industry, in practice. Those may sound controversial, but let me explain.

GNU/Linux has come a long way since XMMS, the Winamp wannabe. The number of free media players has bloomed: Amarok, Banshee, Rhythmbox, Kaffeine, Kplayer and JuK. They have enough features to cater for every need a dedicated music lover could wish for. So Songbird, which is not even at version 1.0, would have its work cut out to rival those media players especially the ability to play video as well as music. But Songbird has one unique feature. It has a built-in browser, Mozilla, which allows it to extract maximum mileage from your music collection. Web integration leverages your music and allows you to do some really great stuff. This article will look at the features of Songbird that make it an essential addition to any installation.

Ever since I first fired up KDE on openSuSE, I’ve been in love. The KDE interface just swept me off my feet. But there’s always been one nagging thing. Firefox and Thunderbird stick out like two sore thumbs. They don’t look like KDE apps (see figure 1 and figure 4), they don’t work with KDE programs (like KPrinter), and they just don’t feel like they belong in KDE. Luckily, since both of these apps have support for add-ons, it is easy to remedy this.